Free Will?
May 21, 2009
In response to livelyackerman’s post:
The fact that an action is a consequence of previous actions, does not mean that the fact has no importance in itself. You can see it from two perspective – One, as a deterministic series of actions, reactions and synthesis and Two, as an action for itself. The things that we go through in life affect out decisions, including our education, the place where we grew up and the things that we were taught to believe. Calling such a complex system deterministic is very easy, but considering that there are literally millions and billions of factors involved, and that every human goes through a different experience of life, and so has different causes and effects means that there’s no possible way of knowing what you’re going to do. You’d have to go through every milisecond of your life, your parents life and all of history for that. So, determinism doesn’t really matter. And yes, our actions may be predestined, but we can’t know what they will be – so that doens’t matter.
If God predetermines everything, can He or does He therefore participate in the process of evil to the extent that He knows of every evil act before its commission? Yes, he does. The only dilemma here is that it’s uncomfortable for you to think about it. If god is everything, he is also evil.
Does our Maker’s omniscience completely preclude any substantive notion of human free will? How can one make any meaningful deliberate and free choice where our choice is already known by a higher being? Already explained that. Freedom, or the illusion of Freedom is the result of an infinitesimal amount of events that you can’t possibly know about (a neuron moving in your brain) so it doesn’t matter.
If god knows all, how can there be free will? It can’t. It’s either Omniscience or Free Will.
And as for morals, faith is my answer too. Faith in, say, a series of principles that are written by humans and incarnated in laws, constitutions and actual deeds. Faith does not require God, a god or any supernatural being. Faith is just our name for a belief that things we don’t see can be true. These things are generally derived from stories, but they can also be derived from, say, documents. When we sign an agreement, such as a truce or a peace treaty, we “create” peace. Thus, our faith in peace creates a state of peace, bound by law and the force of international organizations who’s interest it is to uphold it (because they believe in a certain way people should treat each other).
True, that does pull the wind out of the whole “My morals are better because God said so” argument. That just means you’ll have to find a better reason for enforcing your morals. Such as… the well being of mankind, and who would want to put their faith such a ridiculous notion?
